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Existentialism In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

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Those are part of the lyrics of a song on my playlist which never until after I read Ellison’s “Invisible Man” I had paid such close attention to the lyrics.The lyrics now stood in front of me as an epiphany which enabled me to better understand the abstruse novel. A novel in which the narrator is an invisible man, but “…not a spook like those that haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor… one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms” (Ellison, 3.) He is a human being made out of flesh and bone, but whom because of his time in history and his ethnicity, lives in a disadvantageous social position. This social inequality places the speaker in a state of alienation which ultimately makes him invisible as people refuse to see him. And up to some point, not even …show more content…

He now becomes conscious of his existence and place in history. These ideas conveyed in Ellison’s novel allure to concepts of existentialism and the conscious state of mind. These peculiar traits are quite common amongst those writers linked to the Beat generation. Despite the fact that Ralph Ellison’s novel was published during the roaring insurgence of the Beats and that the vast majority of the plot is based in Harlem, it is not categorized as or linked to the Beat generation. However, taking into account the diversity of the polemic topics enclosed within, this novel is similar to those works of Beat writers in the sense that they are a derangement of the senses which invites the reader to become conscious and proactive in their time in …show more content…

From racial and gender inequality, to drugs, incest, adultery, to a quite unsettling scene where a quasi-lobotomy is conducted on the speaker (scene that resembles to Ginsberg’s “Howl.”) The novel encapsulates the rawness of humanity and it is perhaps by showing stereotypical veil society’s standards arise that Ellison is inciting the reader to stand against the increasing passion from ‘above’ “…to make men to conform to a pattern” (Ellison, 576.) Arguments which Burroughs would agree with. This as in a short poem Burroughs expresses his inconformity against those acts of society upon which it stands

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